The Portuguese, from the necessity of the case, traded sword in hand; and their intercourse with the nations of the East was much more marked by the insolence of conquest, than by the complaisance of traders. Goa, some three hundred miles to the north of Calicut, which fell into their power in 1510, became a splendid city, the vice-royal and archiepiscopal seat, whence were governed a multitude of widespread dependencies. The rule of the Portuguese viceroy extended on the west by Diu, Ormus, and Socotra (commanding the entrances into the Gulf of Cambay, the Persian Gulf, and the Red Sea), along the east coast of Africa by Melinda to Sofala, opposite the south part of Madagascar. Malacca, near the extremity of the peninsula of Further India, occupied in 1511, became the capital of their possessions and conquests in the far East, and soon rose into a magnificent seat of empire and commerce, second only to Goa. Among the most valuable dependencies of Malacca were the Moluccas or Spice Islands. The islands of Sumatra, Java, and Borneo,—in the occupation of which the Mahometans had preceded them,—Celebes, Mindanao, and even New Guinea were coasted, and commercial and political relations established, to a greater or less degree, with the native chiefs. The coasts of Pegu, Siam, Cambodia, and the southern parts of China, were visited as early as 1516; but the usual insolence of the Portuguese, in attempting to establish a fortified post not far from Canton, resulted in the imprisonment and miserable death of an ambassador of theirs, then on his way to Pekin, while it gave a new impulse to the suspicious policy of the Chinese, which allowed no intercourse with foreigners, and even forbade the Chinese junks to trade to foreign ports. In spite, however, of this prohibition, numerous Chinese merchants, self-exiled from home, were established in the principal trading marts of the southeastern seas; and with their aid, and sometimes that of the corsairs, by whom the coasts of China were then, as now, greatly infested, and by bribing the mandarins, a sort of commerce, a cross between smuggling and privateering, was carried on along the Chinese coast. The principal marts of this commerce were Ningpo (known to the Portuguese as Liampo, on the continent, opposite the isle of Chusan, in the suburbs of which city the Portuguese managed to establish a trading settlement) and Sancian, an island near the entrance of the bay of Canton, where the Chinese merchants from Canton met the Portuguese traders, who, during a few months in each year, sojourned there in temporary huts while the trade was going on. Down, however, to the year 1542 nothing had yet been heard of Japan, beyond Marco Polo’s mention and brief account of it.